Is Obama "the JFK of the Net?”. Nearly eighteen months after this question raised by PoliticsOnline, the outsider Barack Obama officially won the nomination of the democratic party for the American presidential election of next November 4, after a fight baited against Hillary Clinton. A long electoral campaign which saw the Web fully used like an effective tool with the service of a candidate.
These months of campaign will remain in the history like a step moreover in long walk towards e-Democracy, i.e. towards a greater citizens participation in the political life. The first true campaign of the 21st century is held in this moment, that which will remain can be as fundamental as that of 1960, when the debate televised between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon made TV a ground impossible to circumvent to carry out an electoral campaign. The candidate himself declares in Times that “one off the biggest surprised of the campaign, just how powerfully our social message merged with the networking and the power of the Internet”
The campaign of Senator Obama is the fruit of a meeting between a popular aspiration with change, a strong mobilization of young people and Internet. How a quasi unknown candidate and with few financial resources could have been essential without the formidable capacity of Internet to mobilize supporters quickly and to collect funds massively? Nearly one million people (918.846 precisely at June 8) are registered, for example, in the support group for Barack Obama on Facebook and its vidéos published on YouTube was viewed 37 million times.
The Internet was in the middle of the strategy of campaign of Barack Obama. Since the advertisement of its candidature on YouTube until the two million volunteers recruited on line to go on the ground to preach the fine words, all that makes Internet was put at contribution.
Peter Leyden, of the Institute New Politics, quoted by Times last May, stressed that "what's amazing is that Hillary Clinton built the best campaign that has ever been done: she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembed an all-star team of consultants and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she's getting beaten by the political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics”. “Her campaign will be the last signal-down campaign one the Democratic side” ensures Joe Trippi, the ex adviser of Howard Dean.
Irony of the history, this new model was invented by John McCain, who, in 2000 against George W. Bush, was the first to collect funds by Internet, collecting 6 million dollars then (Today, at this stage, Barack Obama collected more than 200 million dollars on line). He will be the author, two years later, of a law on the financing of the electoral campaigns which ended the era of a few big donors funding party politics. The maximum legal amount of any individual donation bacame 2.000 dollars (2.300 dollars in this election). But what the team of Obama understood, because to the experience of Howard Dean in 2004, is that a much better point of entry wasn't 2.000 dollars but less than one-tenth of that.
"It is a seismic change," says Michael Malbin, the executive direc tor of the Campaign Finance Institute. "This year's donors are not just givers. They are doers."
To read again the preceding articles:
- Is Obama the JFK of the Net? January 18, 2007
